Word processing and document editing is never going to be easy on the iPhone. The screen’s small, the keyboard’s smaller and you can’t insert any animated cat gifs, at least not without a lot of effort. There are some pretty spiffy writing apps for iOS, but it’s not the same as working on a desktop.

You know what, though? The iPhone is great at note-taking. Scribble out some ideas or outline your next draft — that’s where a writer can find some real use for an iPhone. Scratch, a note-taking app, is pushing those scribbles to the next level. Integration with just about everything and Markdown support really makes this little app a strong contender in the note-taking field. (more…)

I’ve got a problem, and it’s headphones. Although the iPhone 5 came with EarPods that are much better than the previous earbuds, I still find myself looking for a nice and comfortable set of headphones. Turns out that I now have a small collection going, with no end in sight. There’s the pair that I use because they have a noise canceling feature, or the ones I toss in a bag because they’re small and convenient. Some I wear in public because they don’t leak sound, others I try to hide because of their cost.

What about you? What kind of headphones do you use with your iPhone? Let us know in the poll to the right!

PDFs are a powerful way to share formatted content without having to worry about file compatibility or conversion errors. Printing a Pages document to PDF ensures that everyone from a Linux nerd to a Windows junkie sees an identical file. While an increasing reliance on PDFs means that all users see an identical document, fixing occasional typos and errors requires that users return to the source file, fix the errors and re-export the document. A PDF-based workflow begs for a more powerful PDF tool, one that doesn’t require users to return to the original file to make one small change. There are plenty of PDF annotation apps in the App Store, but few of these have the power to edit beyond the annotation layer.

PDFpen is a popular PDF editor for the Mac that’s both powerful and affordable. Smile released its iPad version of PDFpen less than a year ago, bringing some of the desktop version’s most powerful features to the iPad. The company recently completed the device trinity with the addition of PDFpen for iPhone.

We’re bombarded with logos and advertising slogans all day long. Right now there may be an Apple logo on your computer, or maybe a thing of Yoplait Yogurt with their logo emblazoned on the side. But if you were to try to figure out what logos were what without the benefit of having the name in it, would you be able to? This is the premise of Logo Quiz, a fun game that is free for the next week!

So you want to know how it works, right? The game shows you either an entire logo, or a portion of the logo. You have to choose between four different possible options. If you get it right, you move forward. If not, the streak is ended.

But wait, there’s more. You start the game with a certain amount of gems. If you need a hint, just spend a few gems and some of the options get eliminated for you. And before you start thinking that this is all about in-app purchases, you also earn gems the longer your streaks go.

What makes Logo Quiz different from the competition is the new Multiplayer Mode. This allows you to challenge your friends via email and Facebook, or you can just challenge some random people to see who’s the better competitor. Coming soon, no more ads, plus loaded in-app purchases worth $0.99.

Go Get It!

You’d better head to the App Store right now, because Logo Quiz is only free for a few more days! Over 5 million users play this game today and over 1 billion logos have been answered — get yourself in on the fun! Go get hooked on it now!

Even before the launch of the App Store, people were consumed with finding ways to be more productive. Technology has both hindered and attempted to help at solving that problem. The more things we do online, the more we find that we benefit from tools to help make those things easier and take them off our minds.

If you’re like me, you’re always looking for ways to be more productive. In fact, there are thousands of apps available on the app store dedicated to just that. One of those tools is the app Easilydo, which claims it can be your life assistant. That’s quite an impressive title to throw around. Read on to see if it lives up to that declaration. (more…)

Your friends are coming over for cocktails and trying to decide what to serve is completely overwhelming. After finally building up the nerve to try out that hip speakeasy, you don’t recognize half the jargon on the drinks menu. Margaritas every Friday night are getting boring, and you want to try something new. The iPhone app, Food & Wine Cocktails is just what you need to shake things up.

Food & Wine Magazine and Belvedere Vodka have come together to create a sleek, sexy cocktail app designed to inspire your creativity and refine your technique in the area of home bartending. This free app contains 350 drinks, along with 25 Bar Snacks from the pages of Food & Wine Magazine, tips on setting up your home bar, and a dictionary of spirits.

In the past half a decade, there has been a tremendous shift in the way news is delivered to us. Twitter, as an Internet model, revolutionized the way we access information from all our favourite news sources. But there is still one huge problem with an Internet-based news model: There are too many news sources out there.

Enter the newest news delivery method: curation. Unlike an aggregator (like the Huffington Post or RSS feed, for example), news curators aren’t simply fetching articles from their favourite websites and posting them in one place. They hand-pick articles and deliver what they deem to be the most important news of the day into hand-picked packages of content.

Dave Pell is a news curator (or, as he pitches himself, a human algorithm). His universal app (and email newsletter) is called NextDraft. And his work is brilliant. (more…)

With increasingly more information on the Internet, the question has become: How can I filter through all the uninteresting stuff to get to the things I really care about? Rockmelt delivers an endless stream of content — so you can explore as much as you want — but also allows you to personalize your stream.

Additionally, you can take advantage of the social media aspects, including commenting on stories and sharing the best ones with friends. Click “more” to take a look at what Rockmelt offers. (more…)

One of the biggest reasons why I love my iPhone is that it can be used for so many different things if you are willing to push its limits. Since becoming a teacher, in the last few years I have started to experiment with using iPod Touches, iPhones and other mobile devices in the classroom. I love to show kids how they can use their smartphones for more than just texting their friends and actually learning something.

One of the main things that we use the devices for is to not only consume content, but to make content that they can share with me and other classmates. There are a variety of apps out there that can do this, but I had my students try out Backspaces for a bit, and they seemed to really take to it. The more that I started to use and play with it, the more I saw why they liked it. (more…)